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Friday, September 25, 2009

Conference wrap-up – Chat with Steven Newhouse

So it's Friday, last day of the conference, how do you think the week went?

SN: It's been a long tiring week but its been very successful. We've had many excellent conversations and have a good understanding of how EGEE will carry on for the rest of the project and transition to EGI. And we've made real progress in sketching out how EGI will be setting itself up in the new year and the actual structures and interactions between the EGI-InSPIRE project and the other projects which will be submitted in the Framework 7 call this November.

Can you tell us about the news to come out of this week?

SN: Yesterday's EGI council meeting was particularly successful in terms of making progress on EGI's governance structure. The EGI council elected a chair – Per Öster from CSC in Finland. And that means there is now someone to drive the agenda of the EGI activity and to help liaise with the proposal writing team in preparation for the 24th of November (the proposal due date).

What is on the horizon?

SN: The proposal is now the main focus for practically everyone in the community – both EGI and the related projects. Funding EGI on its own would be practically ineffective. There would be no support for the user communities, the user communities are still working out how they will engage with the infrastructure and reach out to the ESFRI projects. The middleware, which the infrastructure is critically reliant upon, will be the subject of other European proposals.

Another great highlight of the week was the successful sessions with the ESFRI projects. These are large projects which will be very reliant upon large computing facilities as they start up over the next five to ten years. Having a generic infrastructure – such as the one that can be coordinated through EGI – will help those projects avoid rebuilding a distributed analysis framework.

Good work this week everyone, it will be exciting to track the developments in the next few months!